ACLU Sues NSA to Stop Mass Internet Spying

BALTIMORE – The American Civil Liberties Union filed a major new lawsuit
today on behalf of a broad group of organizations challenging the
National Security Agency’s mass interception and searching of Americans’
international Internet communications, including emails, web-browsing
content, and search-engine queries.

The plaintiffs are the Wikimedia Foundation, the conservative
Rutherford Institute, The Nation magazine, Amnesty International USA,
PEN American Center, Human Rights Watch, the National Association of
Criminal Defense Lawyers, Global Fund for Women, and Washington Office
on Latin America.

At issue is the NSA’s “upstream” surveillance, which involves the
NSA’s tapping into the internet backbone inside the United States – the
physical infrastructure that carries Americans’ online communications
with each other and with the rest of the world. The NSA conducts this
spying under a law called the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which allows
the agency to target the communications of foreigners abroad.

In the course of its surveillance, the NSA copies and combs through
vast amounts of Internet traffic, which it intercepts inside the United
States with the help of major telecommunications companies. It searches
that traffic for keywords called “selectors” that are associated with
its targets. The surveillance involves the NSA’s warrantless review of
the emails and Internet activities of millions of ordinary Americans.

“This kind of dragnet surveillance constitutes a massive invasion of
privacy, and it undermines the freedoms of expression and inquiry as
well,” said ACLU Staff Attorney Patrick Toomey. “Ordinary Americans
shouldn’t have to worry that the government is looking over their
shoulders when they use the Internet.”

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Maryland where the NSA is
headquartered, argues that the NSA is violating the plaintiffs’ privacy
rights under the Fourth Amendment and infringing on their First
Amendment rights. The complaint also argues that upstream surveillance
exceeds the authority granted by Congress under the FISA Amendments Act.

“By tapping the backbone of the Internet, the NSA is straining the
backbone of democracy,” said Lila Tretikov, executive director of the
Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, one of the most visited
websites in the world. “Wikipedia is founded on the freedoms of
expression, inquiry, and information. By violating our users’ privacy,
the NSA is threatening the intellectual freedom that is a central to
people’s ability to create and understand knowledge.”

The plaintiffs include human rights, legal, media, and information
organizations whose work requires them to engage in sensitive
communications with people outside the United States, such as
colleagues, clients, journalists, and victims of human rights abuses.
The lawsuit argues that upstream surveillance interferes with the
groups’ abilities to do their jobs by violating the confidentiality of
their communications and by making it more difficult to obtain crucial
information from contacts and sources who communicate with them, often
at significant personal risk.

The lawsuit is in some ways a successor to a previous ACLU lawsuit challenging the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program, Clapper v. Amnesty.
The Supreme Court dismissed that case in February 2013 in a 5-4 vote on
the grounds that the plaintiffs could not prove that they had been
spied on. Edward Snowden has said that the ruling contributed to his
decision to expose certain aspects of the NSA’s surveillance activities a
few months later.

Among the Snowden disclosures were documents relating to upstream
surveillance, which has since been confirmed by the government. Unlike
the surveillance considered by the Supreme Court in Clapper,
upstream surveillance is not limited to the communications of NSA
targets. Instead, as we have since learned, the NSA is searching the
content of nearly all text-based Internet traffic entering or leaving
the country – as well as many domestic communications – looking for
thousands of keywords such as email addresses or phone numbers.

One of the NSA documents revealed by Snowden included a slide
that named Wikipedia, among other major websites, as a good
surveillance target for monitoring what people do on the
Internet.

The new case is Wikimedia v. NSA. The attorneys are Toomey,
Jameel Jaffer, Alex Abdo, and Ashley Gorski from the ACLU; David Rocah
and Deborah Jeon from the ACLU of Maryland; and Charles Sims, David
Munkittrick, and John Browning from the law firm Proskauer Rose LLP.

About Me

We do not open attachments. Stop e-mailing them. Threats and abusive e-mail are not covered by any privacy rule. This isn't to the reporters at a certain paper (keep 'em coming, they are funny). This is for the likes of failed comics who think they can threaten via e-mails and then whine, "E-mails are supposed to be private." E-mail threats will be turned over to the FBI and they will be noted here with the names and anything I feel like quoting.
This also applies to anyone writing to complain about a friend of mine. That's not why the public account exists.